English Signage Better for the Community

Asian-American communities are among the fastest-growing and most vibrant groups in my Northeast Queens district.  The Korean-American community in Bayside, in particular, has been critical for the community's economic growth.  Small businesses are critical to our city's economic recovery, and the last thing we can do in this climate is to hit them with costly compliance fines. 

But many of them don't have their signs in English.  And English-speaking people in my district feel excluded walking down the streets of their home city. 

Grace Meng, my friend and the Assemblymember who represents Flushing, has sponsored legislation in Albany that would require stores to translate their signs into English.  She is putting together an advisory board of local business owners for the project. 

Small businesses are having a very hard time making ends meet, and Grace and I agree:  we don't want to pursue violations against businesses that don't have signs in English.  

I'm not interested in hurting businesses or burdening them.  But it's important that businesses in our country have signs in English, the language of our country.

In Assemblymember Meng's downtown Flushing district, for example, Korean-American businesses are going to have a hard enough time making ends meet during construction of Flushing Commons.  (This is why I proposed Resolution 475, asking the state government to provide sales tax relief to these businesses during construction.) 

I'd like to set a deadline for businesses to replace their signs with newer ones including English translations – and to help those businesses afford these translations through targeted tax breaks if they enroll their non-English speaking employees in ESL programs. 

But this is only a short-term solution to an immediate problem.  We should be spending less money on translations and laws that burden or hurt small businesses.  

Instead of translating signs, we need to invest in teaching immigrants the English language. This would save us millions in the long run, and help immigrants succeed here in New York.

The language barrier often restricts immigrants to low-paying jobs and results in their seeking refuge in ethnic enclaves with others who speak their language, as opposed to assimilating with our larger society.  It might not be politically correct, but it's the smart move for immigrant communities are our city's overburdened taxpayers.